Biblical Hebrew Forum

[yochanan bitan <ButhFam AT compuserve.com>]

shalom vince

>... my contention has always been that if you bracket the 
> consecutives in the classical idiom, you have the same 
> basic syntax from day one... until the present.
 
see below under last point.

>been teaching myself modern hebrew so i can access materials on
> masoretic studies. 

kol ha-kavod. matay tavo utevaqqer otanu po biyrushalayim?

> that doesn't mean i've got all the answers! just the basic key

on generating hebrew clauses from an SVO template and ignoring vav
ha-hippux, you might study and respond to Buth, "Functional Grammar, Hebrew
and Aramaic", especially sections 3.0-3.2 (pp. 80-83) in Bodine,ed., 1995.
By all means generate your structures but keep them psychologically trim
and functionally productive. a Pn-V-S-O produces a much more satisfactory
read than the S-V-O's on the market. [Pn=n-ary pragmatic slot.] and
Pn-V-S-O  does not preclude putting a V into the P slot, e.g. with
jussives, as you will have seen in my verbless clause article in
miller,ed., 1999, for V(participle)-S-X and the rare X-V(participle)-S-X.

braxot leshana tova
randall buth